#you're going to be a STATISTICIAN

[dampfoxes]

not to be dramatic but

[realcube]

hi cutie!! your work makes me froth at the mouth <3333 also hear me out on this: ts! yaku talking with ts! lev after one of his games and lev introduces you as his foreign cousin and yaku is like omg cutie

this has been dinging around in my mind all week like a screensaver ily mwah

A/N → omg that's soo good !! ty for blessing me with this 🙏 also you literally read my mind cuz i've been having endless yaku brainrot recently

TWS/TAGS → fem!reader, reader is a statistician ??, modelling slander & cursing

yaku wipes his forehead with a towel while he is sat at the side of the court. the match is over and everyone is beginning to filter out of the stadium, including his teammates, but not without giving him a celebratory slap on the back or handshake first.

they all make their way towards the exit, where there are crowds of interviewers and tv cameramen waiting to pester them about their winning game. yaku wasn't quite ready yet to deal with the onslaught of questions and praise, so he remains on bench a bit longer, still trying to properly catch his breath.

that was until he heard the familiar voice of an old friend yell, "hey, shorty!"

he looked up to see lev walking towards him, with his arms wide open for a hug. it had been over a year since yaku had seen lev, since his modelling career had really taken off and presented unmissable oppertunities all over the world. yaku couldn't help but crack a smile, even at the terrible nickname.

as lev made his way towards him, he couldn't help but notice the girl he was with. stunning. a beauty unlike any other. so graceful and elegant in their movements, wearing a benign smile that caused yaku's heart to skip a beat.

naturally, he assumes you are lev's model girlfriend, or something like that. that was the only reasonable explanation he could think of, but even then, you were still miles out of lev's league. as you both approached, yaku tried his best to pay little mind towards you, as the reminder of lev's fortune would only piss him off and spoil what was supposed to be a joyful reunion.

"lev." he said, outstretching his arm for a handshake but he should've expected it when lev scooped him up in a big, tight hug.

"yaku! it's been forever!"

"put me down!" he demanded, and lev obliged, still beaming at him.

"congratulations on your win." lev said, and you added, "yeah, you were amazing."

yaku couldn't help but blush at your compliment, and he bowed his head in thanks towards both you and lev. which is what prompted lev to clear his throat and clarify, "oh! this is my cousin (y/n) from abroad."

you wave slightly to accompany the introduction, meanwhile yaku looks between the two of you, absolutely star-struck. "cousin?" he repeats.

"yeah." lev chuckled awkwardly, motioning towards himself and joking, "you're probably confused because i am so much better-looking but it's beca—"

you playfully elbow him in the side and he grunts slightly, then bursts out laughing while you exchange a knowing look with yaku. "so are you a model too?" he asks.

a fiery heat rises to your face and you tense, shaking your head slightly, "no, i'm just here with lev because i wanted to see the game."

he takes notice of the fact his question flustered you a little, and this brings him a new-found confidence, "have you ever thought of going into modelling?"

you blink a couple times while thinking about it, then shrug, "it's never really crossed my mind. i like the job i have."

"oh, yeah!" lev chimes in, "she's a statistician, isn't that super fancy?"

you nod in agreement with your cousin's enthusiasm, elaborating, "i know it doesn't sound cool but i get to chill in a big office and i hardly have to talk to anyone."

yaku agrees that a career devoid of other people's stupidity sounds like a dream come true, but he inquires, "so you just hide behind a computer all day?"

you nod proudly.

"sounds like a waste of such a pretty face." he chuckles to himself at how your eyes widen and your hand rushes to cover the bottom half of your face, "really, though, you should think about modelling. it's probably a lot easier and pays more. plus, i'd rather see your face on billboards than his."

he gestures to lev, who slaps his hand against his chest and lets out a dramatic gasp, "what's wrong with my face?! and modelling is not easy; it's one of the hardest jobs in the world and not for the weak."

"i'm sure styling your hair is very difficult, lev." yaku says sarcastically.

you laugh and interject, "he doesn't even style his own hair, he has someone to do that for him."

yaku raises an eyebrow, trying to suppress a shit-eating grin, "so what the fuck do you do?"

lev crosses his arms over his chest and pouts, walking towards the exit, "you two can come find me when you're done being mean."

you both snicker to yourselves at lev's behaviour, realising you only tease him out of love, really. so when your laughter dies down, you begin to follow him at a safe distance behind. "how long are you going to be in russia for?" yaku asks, recalling that lev mentioned you're from a different country.

"just today." you reply, "this trip was so last-minute for me. lev just messaged me a week ago asking if i wanted to come and i said sure. i wanted to stay for a whole week but virtually all nearby hotels were booked. it's a miracle i even managed to find a room for tonight."

yaku frowned at your story, "that sucks. but i know a motel that has availability for this week."

"really?" you perk up, "what's it called?"

"my house."

[olderthannetfic]

I don't know if you're aware of this but the end of year AO3 stats posts are going around and one of the largest and longest running studies is extremely flawed (for example, reporting Dean/Cas had 2348 new works when they actually had 6456). Here's a post about it: https://www.tumblr.com/5ummit/738707388904898560/

--

Huh! I thought she was better at stats than this. We were on a panel together at one point, and she seems cool, but unfortunately, fandom stats are often not done all that well.

I know we all love graphs, but I want everyone to be critical of this stuff, including mine. I love Toast's work too, in addition to centreoftheselights, but I remember some old Wattpad stats where the methodology was to mark any work too incoherent to classify as gen... (LOL. Dude, have you seen Wattpad? Default gen, my ass!) There are tons of things wrong with every major fandom stats project or regular poster's work.

I haven't gotten on this soapbox lately, mostly because I've been too busy to run any of my own stats stuff heavily this year, but yeah... "Fandom stats" tend to consist of the same like... maaaaaaybe 4-5 fans, most of whom aren't statisticians.

I got invited to a con panel a few times based on... like... existing in public. And don't get me wrong: I do try to make sure shit I post is accurate and labeled as what it actually is, but I know I'm nothing hot when it comes to stats. I think I ask slightly smarter questions than usual and am willing to hand-count more things, but my actual "stats" are just "Here's the % of X. Here's the % of Y." and not a higher level analysis.

It's simply that the field is wide open with no competition. Aside from a tiny handful of repeat posters, it's just millions of randos grabbing the same few numbers from AO3 works search or filters and going "Gasp! Fandom has X% m/m!" (Ignoring that it's an AO3-only % and that everyone has access to this number and that it's a boring-ass thing to repost for the thousandth time.)

A new wrinkle is, of course, that if one uses one's personal account, one may have people muted. I suppose I'll have to get a new account if I want to be really accurate about stuff, though I think I currently only have 2 people muted and they're not prolific.

--

I don't want to put my own work down or that of the other people who post stats, but as audience members, we have got to get in the habit of reading the methodology section more carefully.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

So, to follow up on this post that I just made that details my thoughts on the Taskmaster s18 lineup: Jack Dee, Rosie Jones, Emma Sidi, and Babatunde Aléshé...

I’m totally kidding! Obviously I’m totally kidding. Obviously. Obviously I was kidding in that entire post, suggesting that I give one fuck who those other four people are. It doesn't matter! Obviously in reality, seats 2-5 of Taskmaster s18 could be filled by Leo Kearse, Jim Davidson, Jordan Peterson, and Suella Braverman, and I’d still consider this to be a fantastic lineup.

Okay. Finally, after several weeks of losing my God damn mind, sitting on the spoilers and being good about not mentioning it (mostly…), I can say this. Finally.

Let’s talk Zaltzman.

First of all, let me set the scene. I've just finished my work for the day. I'm waiting in the break room while my co-worker files her stuff so we can close up the building together. I check my phone, because it's Taskmaster lineup spoiler day, and I've been waiting on confirmation.

I read the words and drop my phone in amazement, scrambling to catch it before it hits the ground. I look again, trying to make 100% sure I am reading this right, because I refuse to get my hopes up that high just to be disappointed. No, it says what I thought it said. I jump up, bang my fist against my chest and then into the air and then back again, mutter “fuck yes fucking right holy fuck” under my breath repeatedly, and then look around and am pleased to see my co-worker has not come into the room. And then I’m not allowed to post about it for several fucking weeks.

Andy was top of my wishlist. Possibly the number one person on it even if I could have literally anyone, including the people who definitely wouldn’t do it. He was definitely the number one person on my Taskmaster wishlist, out of the people who would possibly ever do it. But I wasn’t sure he belonged on that second list. Every time I’ve posted about a Taskmaster wishlist in the last couple of years, I’ve said of course Andy Zaltzman’s number one, but I know it won’t happen.

I know Taskmaster casts people who aren't already TV famous, but they're usually young. Taskmaster casts older people who are well established in a TV career, and young up-and-comers. Not people who turn 50 this year and did an episode of 8 Out of 10 Cats one time in 2008.

I mean, Andy Zaltzman isn’t completely obscure. It’s now been several years since he took over as host of The News Quiz, which I think is Radio 4’s flagship comedy program. The Bugle has been going for nearly 17 years and is quite successful. It’s not fair to imply that 2008 was his last TV credit; he was on Alternative Comedy Experience in 2013, where he had some chats with Stewart Lee that are among the most socially awkward things I’ve ever seen in my life. Sometimes they let him on TV in Australia. He did Matt Forde’s TV thing a few times. He does actually have a very successful career as a cricket statistician/commentator. He wrote for Bremner, Bird and Fortune in 2006. He’s doing fine. He's doing absolutely fine.

And he has an impressive stand-up career. He's done tours in the States, off the back of The Bugle's international success. He's performed in Asia off the back of his cricket commentating popularity. He's sold out big rooms to hordes of Bugle fans.

Taskmaster has cast lots of people who were less famous at the time of casting than Andy Zaltzman is now. They're just not usually Andy Zaltzman's age. But it doesn't matter, he's there now. So let me tell you about this man.

Andrew Zechariah Zaltzman was born on October 6, 1974. He grew up in Tumbridge Wells, Kent, a place he has described as so right-wing that they think you're a bit of a leftie if you only cast one Tory vote per general election. Raised by his father Zechariah "Zack" Zaltzman, who was a sculptor and a Lithuanian lapsed Jew who grew up in South Africa. Along with his sister Helen and brother Rick. I don't know his mother's name and it's probably fine to keep it that way, as I'm pretty sure Andy Zaltzman attracts a lot of fans like me, who have my combination of information-gathering autism and a good memory, that means I did not have to do any Googling to write that paragraph. I could have included the name of his school without Googling just because I've read his Wikipedia page so much, but I'll refrain from doing that.

To be fair, it's not some obscure piece of trivia to know his sister's name, because Helen Zaltzman is one of the only people in Britain who's had a podcast for longer than Andy. Podcasting was quite new when The Bugle started, but Helen started her podcast Answer Me This just before it. Helen Zaltzman's not technically a comedian, but she's quite comedy-adjacent, her podcasts are funny and she's been in plays at the Edinburgh Festival. Hangs out with comedians. Was friends with Josie Long at Oxford, so that's pretty cool. Used to be flatmates with comedy flatshare expert Matthew Crosby. Did an episode of ComComPod.

Anyway, after being raised with a future comedy-adjacent podcaster, Andy went to study Classics at Oxford University, where he also worked for the sports page of the student newspaper. It was here that he discovered his love of made-up bullshit, as he once wrote an entirely fictitious article about a game that never happened. When told they couldn't print it because it was libellous, Andy tried to argue that he hadn't libelled anyone because none of the people he wrote about in that article exist. Andy Zaltzman swears that story is true, and I think it probably is.

Andy Zaltzman did one stand-up gig at university that went very badly, then didn't do any stand-up for a bit, and then eventually did some more gigs that went less badly. Ended up in the finals of So You Think You’re Funny in 1999, where he lost to David O’Doherty (other finalists included Jimmy Carr, Russell Howard, and Josie Long, the latter of whom beat David O’Doherty in the BBC New Comedy Awards in the same year, a year of traded victories that they still amusingly and adorably reference on social media sometimes).

Andy Zaltzman got in with Avalon management, and in 2000, he went back to Edinburgh as part of The Comedy Zone. Also in 2000, he supported Stewart Lee on a stand-up tour around the UK. A lot of the venues were not told that there would be a support act and couldn’t fit him in at the last minute, so essentially, it was less like doing tour support and more like Andy just followed Stewart Lee around the country for a few weeks. Stewart Lee got so exhausted by the effort of trying to hang out with someone as socially awkward as Andy Zaltzman that he quit stand-up for several years (that’s a joke, but he did actually quit – eventually going back to stand-up but never back to his agency – because he got frustrated with Avalon on that tour, largely because they kept doing things like failing to tell venues that he was bringing a support act). In 2005, Stewart Lee returned to stand-up, and shared a flat at the Edinburgh Festival with Andy Zaltzman that year. Across the next 15 years, Stewart Lee took several opportunities to marvel at how it was possible for one person to watch as much sport as Andy Zaltzman did, when on tour and in Edinburgh flats.

In 2001, Andy did his first full-length Edinburgh show, called Andy Zaltzman Versus the Dog of Doom, which got nominated for the Perrier Newcomer Award. It was mainly a solo show, and billed as a solo show, but it featured a few bits with a man he'd met on the stand-up circuit named John Oliver, who was performing in The Comedy Zone. In 2002, Andy went back to Edinburgh with a show called Andy Zaltzman Unveils the 2002 Catapult of Truth, which also featured bits of John Oliver. John did his debut solo hour that year as well, a show that Chortle’s Steve Bennett called “a fairly pointless concept, which is then tiresomely illustrated”. Clearly, John made the correct choice in deciding that in future years, he’d stick to the stuff with Zaltzman.

In 2003, Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver began writing more comedy together, and were both specifically interested in political comedy. They found this could be difficult on mixed bill gigs where the audience hadn’t come for political comedy, and wouldn’t take well to all the dating and travel mishap stories being interrupted by satire on the colonial immigration process. So they started a comedy night in London called Political Animal, where they would co-host with their own jointly-written political jokes, introducing other comedians who would do exclusively political material. This allowed them to perform to audiences who would get what they were expecting, and it led to them being chased off stage less often (okay, their stories about those years of terrible gigs only include one where they got literally chased off stage). Comedians who performed at Political Animal included Robert Newman, Al Murray, Stewart Lee, Jeremy Hardy, Daniel Kitson, Chris Addison, Frankie Boyle, Andrew Maxwell, Will Hodgson, and don’t worry about the other name on the list from which I've copied this (it was one of those Russells they have now, and by far the worst of the three, despite the other two’s flaws).

On these early Political Animal nights, Zaltzman and Oliver used to do a sketch in which they'd interact with God. If Daniel Kitson was part of the show that night, he'd join them for that sketch and Kitson would play the role of God, which is a little on the nose even for him.

They did Political Animal once a month in London for several years, and also took it to Edinburgh for quite a few years in a row. In 2005, they recorded a pilot for BBC Radio 4, a radio show that would broadcast highlights of each act in a Political Animal night, interspersed with little Zaltzman and Oliver sketches. This got picked up and ran for two seasons, ten episodes in total.

In Edinburgh 2003, Zaltzman and Oliver did Edinburgh and Beyond, a mixed bill with each other and Rob Deering. Some of Andy’s material from that show can be heard in the Radio 4 program 4 at the Fringe. It opens with “Are you all glad to be alive? About half of you. Good. Aren’t festivals fun?” Then he goes into a complex explanation of how King Harold threw the Battle of Hastings and he has proof. This also contains the earliest known recording of Andy Zaltzman's classic joke about how voters' commitment to apathy is a paradox.

Then he says the words: “There are more celebrities now than ever before, in the world. There are also more facts in the world than ever before, and that’s just one of them. There are more celebrities now, and if the current rate of the increase in celebrities now continues, then by the year 2052, celebrities will outnumber ordinary people. And if that continues then by 2142, 99% of the world’s population will be celebrities. At which point the market will implode, and all celebrities will be merged into one giant celebrity, known as God. And the process will start again from scratch. Only this time, God will make the differences between men and women even funnier, and comedians will be the most powerful race on Earth. And after a savage and brutal war between the observationalists and the surrealists, into the power vacuum will come the singing comedians, and the world’s only currency will be amusingly altered pop lyrics. So please, be careful.” And you can begin to see why audiences occasionally chased him off stages. I don’t know what John Oliver was doing with his portion of that shared 2003 bill. Probably some stuff about penguins, given what he was into at the time. He was also very busy ripping cows apart that year. 2003 was a big year for people giving John Oliver large facsimile animals that he did not want and making him deal with them.

In 2004, Zaltzman and Oliver decided to stop messing around with little sketches in each other's shows, and just do the joint stand-up hour that the world had been waiting for. They went to Edinburgh with a show called Zaltzman and Oliver’s Erm... It's About the World... I Think You'd Better Sit Down, which is a hell of a title. They filled in a questionnaire about it for the BBC, which is a lovely little relic. If you want to know what Zaltzman and Oliver were doing during the Edinburgh Festival in 2004:

What will you be doing with the other 23 hrs of the day? JO: I will assign around 8 of those hours for sleep. I'll try and eat three times, spaced out in the time remaining. I will insult my flatmate for a further 3 of those hours. And I will think about sport for the rest of the time. AZ: Table tennis.

(Note: I'm 95% sure the flatmate John Oliver was going to insult for three hours a day is Daniel Kitson.)

They took the show on tour the following year, including performing it one time in 2005 with someone recording the audio. They didn't do anything with that audio until about six years later, when they released it during a filler week for The Bugle. It contains many of their classic joint bits, like the immigration sketch and the state of political discourse sketch.

In 2005, they did another joint Edinburgh show, called John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman Issue a List of Demands and Await Your Response with Interest. Not big fans of titles that fit easily into blurbs. This show unfortunately has been lost to history, or at least, it had better be lost to history, because at this point I will be furious if it turns out Andy Zaltzman has a recording of it somewhere and has been holding out on us all this time (not really, please let me know if you have this, Andy, I would pay you money). Steve Bennett called it: "As a double act [Zaltzman and Oliver] bring out the best of Zaltzman’s towering intellect and Oliver’s  sneery cynicism, feeding off each other’s presence." Which is a pretty solid summary of their double act dynamic in general.

I know there are reviewers besides Steve Bennett, by the way. But Chortle, for all its other admin-related faults, does archive its reviews in a way that makes old ones easy to find, so it tends to be my go-to reference for times like this. I have read other old Zaltzman and Oliver reviews, and a lot of them can be basically summarized as "They have good, intelligent, and funny material, but God, those guys can be really annoying." Brian Logan called them "Better writers than performers", which is maybe technically true but also he can fuck off. We like the socially awkward lack of charisma, okay?

Anyway. Back on topic. While they were establishing their live double act, Zaltzman and Oliver also teamed up with their friend, the excellent comedian Chris Addison, to write a radio show called The Department. This is a fictional show set in a secret government department that secretly runs the entire world, and they spend each episode solving a different problem. It ran on BBC Radio 4 for three seasons and 14 episodes in total, from 2004 to 2006. It featured a bunch of old Zaltzman and Oliver stand-up bits, shoehorned expertly into the mouths of the characters. Zaltzman, Oliver, and Addison co-wrote it and played the three main characters (except Addison didn't write season 3 as he was busy with other projects, but he still did the voice acting), with the other major character being voiced by Matthew Holness, and Lucy Montgomery doing some additional voices (Matthew and Lucy were both in Cambridge Footlights with John Oliver a few years earlier).

They hoped The Department would translate to TV someday, but that didn't happen. Even as late as ten years later, Andy Zaltzman, according to one uncharacteristically vulnerable interview, was still holding out hope that it could someday get picked up as a TV sitcom. John Oliver, on the other hand, said years later that he looked back on The Department as something that wasn't any good. John is, in my accurate opinion, entirely wrong about that. There are some old Zaltzman and Oliver things that I can recognize were objectively not great comedy, I just like them as adorable historical relics. The Department is not like that. I think it was a really, really funny and well written show. It had good characters and dense jokes and I wish it had become more.

These were the glory years of Zaltzman and Oliver. The Department on the radio, joint stand-up shows, hosting mixed bill stuff at Political Animal. But that double act was just a small subset of a larger group called the Chocolate Milk Gang. The Chocolate Milk Gang was an international crime syndicate that sometimes organized soccer matches, to borrow a phrase from John Oliver (John was talking about FIFA when he said it, but it still applies). You can see one of these matches in The Greatest Video on All of YouTube, featuring a lot of comedians who are hard to recognize because it's got about 8 pixels per inch, but you can always pick out Andy with his curly red hair, and John Oliver as the only one wearing long pants instead of shorts. I'm definitely not going to go look at the building where they filmed that video when I go to London this summer. That would be a weird thing to do. I mean I can't confirm whether I'm going to do that, but I will say that one time on his radio show I heard Elis James say Crystal Palace isn't a tourist attraction, and I laughed and said "That's what you think."

Anyway, the Chocolate Milk Gang was actually a bunch of comedians who were all friends in the early 00s, they frequently appeared in each other's stand-up shows (and occasionally radio shows and things like that), told stories about each other on stage, played football on Tuesdays, shared mixed bills, ritualistically sacrificed cows together in the middle of the night, things like that. They got their name because they drank alcohol either not at all or not very much, and after late-night Edinburgh shows they'd go for milkshakes while other comedians were getting drunk, so some of those other comedians started calling them the Chocolate Milk Gang. Glenn Wool has been specifically credited with coining the term, Andrew Maxwell and Jason Byrne were also said to be involved. An absolute cunt who goes by David McSavage was a dick about it. Basically they were a bunch of nerds who got bullied by the Irish and Canadians (not really, they've said they were on friendly terms with those guys and it was friendly banter, except for David McSavage, who is genuinely a cunt). They go by other names sometimes. Stewart Lee apparently used to call them "The Hanging Around Guys".

Further information can be found in the weirdest fucking article I've ever read (on the subject of me knowing about reviewers besides just Steve Bennett - Jay Richardson, what were you fucking talking about?), but basically, they were known for differentiating themselves from a previous generation of showbiz shouty fancy comedians, by doing things like wearing t-shirts and listening to indie music and putting a modicum of creativity into their art and not being alcoholics. Membership lists for the Chocolate Milk Gang changes depending who you ask, but the main people involved, in general, were: Josie Long, John Oliver, Andy Zaltzman, Alun Cochrane, Russell Howard, David O'Doherty, Gavin Osborn, Demitri Martin, Flight of the Conchords. Taika Waititi - Cohen at the time - is sometimes mentioned in that mix. Isy Suttie was definitely around and fit the remit. And Daniel Kitson was their, according to those weird fucking articles about it, king.

To get that list of people, I've taken the name that Glenn Wool invented for people who got milkshakes in Edinburgh, and applied it to a slightly more general concept. Not everyone on that list got milkshakes in Edinburgh in 2002, but most did, and all were part of a larger group of nerds doing comedy who crossed over with each other personally and professionally in that era, which is generally what I mean when I say "Chocolate Milk Gang".

Andy largely ended up in this group because his writing and performing partner, John Oliver, was so close to the ringleader/king Daniel Kitson. John Oliver and Daniel Kitson had repeatedly described each other as best friends. John also brought in Gavin Osborn, his friend from school and/or youth theatre. Gavin was flatmates with John's girlfriend for a time. Basically, John Oliver tied all these people in his life together, and then he fucked off to America, leaving the rest of them behind to keep making stuff with each other. Which they did, but managing it without John in the middle clearly wasn't always their first choice. The number of Chocolate Milk Gang members who have performed art that I have heard on the subject of how it upset them when John Oliver left is... more than three. It's four. I'm thinking of four specific pieces of work right now, though to be fair one of them is just Andy Zaltzman shouting the words "Percy Primetime" at an audience (the others are a song about mix tapes, a show about an apartment that I'm definitely not going to go look at when I fly to London because Crystal Palace isn't a tourist attraction, and a song about a penguin). That's a lot, really. People really, really liked that guy.

Zaltzman and Kitson in particular were a funny combination; whenever they used to end up on stages (or in a radio studio) together, there would be this strong sense of "your best friend is my best friend but God, do we ever have nothing else in common". But they'd give performing together a go, even though Andy Zaltzman is the most socially awkward man in history and has chemistry with no one on Earth except John Oliver. Neither of them seem to "get" the other's comedy in any way, or find much crossover in what they found funny. They shared a flat together in Edinburgh in 2007, where they wrote a sketch for Late 'n' Live in which Andy would pretend to be Daniel Kitson's penis, so that's fun. Andy Zaltzman had a set of about four deliberately bad impressions, which seemed to be the only part of his act that Kitson found funny, but Kitson found them hilarious and made Andy do them every time they performed together.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm trying to tell this story chronologically, and I've moved right past what Andy Zaltzman has referred to as: “The day in June 2006 when [John Oliver] told me he wanted to do the Daily Show job in America instead of going with me to Edinburgh to talk to twenty-five people a day in a darkened room.”

At the time, Zaltzman and Oliver were in the process of writing their third joint stand-up hour, for Edinburgh 2006. This show had already been submitted to the festival, as evidenced by some screenshots of the 2006 Edinburgh program:

The 2006 Edinburgh program also advertised:

And it was the debut year for the Chocolate Milk Gang mixed bill Honourable Men of Art, also already in the program with John's name:

According to Andy Zaltzman, in June 2006, he learned three things very close together, on almost the same day. The first thing he learned is that the BBC had cancelled The Department. This radio show was the only consistent thing Andy had going in his career besides live stand-up. He was counting on The Department getting bigger and maybe picked up for TV, so losing it was a significant blow. The second thing he learned, at almost the same time, was that his wife was carrying their first child. And the third thing he learned was that John Oliver was going to move to America right before their Edinburgh run was set to begin. Andy Zaltzman has described June/July 2006 as not a particularly fun time (John Oliver, on the other hand, has described summer 2006 as the time he lost his radio show and thought his career was fucked, so it's a good thing The Daily Show job came along to save him, because otherwise he'd have ended up stuck in the career path he was on in England, which was terrible, it sure would suck to have to stay on that path).

Andy Zaltzman has even said that if it hadn't been for his marriage and having a kid on the way, he might have moved to New York with John to try to keep performing as a double act, since he didn't have enough of a career in Britain to be worth staying for, and all the success he'd had had come from the Zaltzman and Oliver partnership.

I see why Andy Zaltzman found that partnership and briefly considered whether it might be worth moving across an ocean to preserve it. They worked so well together. They got each other's style of comedy, they were similar enough to fit together but different in the right ways to complement each other. They had incredible chemistry together, of the type that Andy had with, as I've said, no one else in the world. Andy had had to start his own comedy night (Political Animal) just because his style was so offbeat that it didn't fit in on regular mixed bills and it annoyed audiences who hadn't come for that specific niche, and the Zaltzman/Oliver double act saved him from having to sell that niche by himself. He was, as he describes it, not excited to have to go back to doing it alone.

He was also not excited to have to turn their double act Edinburgh show into a solo show at the last minute. But he did it, going to Edinburgh 2006 and performing a show called Andy Zaltzman Detonates 70 Minutes of Unbridled Afternoon ("It's important work Zaltzman is doing, at least compared to most other comics, and deserves to be heard ­ if only he was a bit more fluid in its telling" - Steve Bennett, 2006). I guess it's a better title than Andy Zaltzman Goes By Himself to Edinburgh to Talk to Twenty-Five People a Day in a Darkened Room. In Edinburgh 2006, Andy also hosted Political Animal on his own, and turned up to Honourable Men of Art, where they occasionally had John Oliver via the best live video linkup technology 2006 had to offer.

After this, Andy Zaltzman spent a year performing on his own. In 2007 he performed at MICF for the first time, where one time he stayed up all night in a radio studio with Daniel Kitson, playing BBC sound effects and Boney M songs, and Daniel made him do his Marvin Gaye impression. He also went on the Triple M radio show Get This, and was very socially awkward. Then he won the Piece of Wood Award for having other comics vote his show the best one, so that's cool. Clearly he must have been doing something all right, in a year that he's since described in interviews as very rough overall.

And then he was approached by TimesOnline, a subdivision of The Times, to start a trans-Atlantic podcast. The idea was that John Oliver would go into a studio in New York City, and Andy Zaltzman would go into a studio in London, and they would talk to each other about the week's news, and someone would produce and edit it, and that would be a newfangled thing called a podcast. Like the thing that Andy's sister Helen had just started doing. Andy Zaltzman said yes because, in his words, he had "Jack K. Shit" else going on and it was a chance to reunite the double act that had been working for him. John Oliver said yes because, in his words, it is a treat to get to listen to Andy Zaltzman talk for an hour a week. I think John meant it when he said that, because John Oliver had a very good and very busy job as a writer and correspondent on The Daily Show at the time, in addition to a stand-up career in the States and an increasing schedule of events with major American comics, so it's not like he took the Bugle job because he needed the money or the profile boost. I think he really did consider it a treat to listen to Andy Zaltzman talk for an hour a week. And what a treat that is.

They set up a format in which they'd talk on the phone for a bit earlier in the week, to establish a list of topical subjects to cover. Then they'd go away and each write their own material on those subjects. Then on Fridays, they'd connect from their separate studios and discuss the subjects with their material ready. The best bits made it into their respective stand-up shows.

From the beginning, they both contributed a lot to the podcast, but Andy drove the dialogue and tended to come a little more prepared, as is reasonable, given that John Oliver had other shit going on. The Bugle ran in its original form from October 2007 to March 2016, and in that time, Andy Zaltzman turned over an incredible amount of material. It is honestly amazing how much new stuff he came up with every week. Yeah, he had some ideas and concepts that he re-used, and yeah, not 100% of it was solid gold. But a lot of it was very funny. Funny, dense comedy that was new every single week.

Andy Zaltzman is the most creative comedian I've ever heard. I mean, obviously I guess that depends on your definition of "creative", I've seen some comedy shows where it's so creative that I have no idea what's going on (these are called "clowning"). But within the parametres of just writing straightforward stand-up material, I have never heard anything as creative as Andy Zaltzman. He hits a topic from so many directions that no one else would think of. He reaches for absurd comparisons, turns of phrase that make me run back the recording because I could never catch all the meanings at once, five or six different jokes embedded into one sentence. The number of obscure references to history and/or sport and/or Greek mythology (he didn't study Classics for nothing) he can get into any paragraph is blinding. He's fucking amazing.

More than that, The Bugle with Zaltzman and Oliver was an amazing piece of media. It is incredible how they blended interactivity with tightly written material. Comedians riffing with each other is fun because it feels real and immediate and unrehearsed. Carefully written stuff is good because writing something with care gives comedians the time to make it funnier. The Bugle was Zaltzman and Oliver taking their jokes that they'd crafted to be as funny as possible, and using them as the basis for otherwise spontaneous interaction, so they got the best of both worlds. And it worked, every time, because they have the best chemistry I've ever heard in all of comedy. They were like athletes who could always tell where the other was going to end up, they could take their bit and make sure it would land in just the right spot to work with what the other person would have. Even though they didn't know exactly what the other person had, because they didn't write it together. But they knew each other so well that they could anticipate. It's amazing. It's a fucking amazing feat of comedy and it should be in some sort of hall of fame.

In 2008, Andy Zaltzman wrote a book. It's called Does Anything Eat Bankers? and it's a collection of absurd comedy mini-essays about the credit crunch. It's the most 2008 thing I've ever read. It made me laugh out loud a lot. It's available on eBay for insultingly cheap prices and is an excellent summary of Zaltzman's offbeat sense of humour.

From 2007-2014, Andy Zaltzman hosted Political Animal in Edinburgh every year. Usually on his own, though in 2011, John Oliver flew to Edinburgh and they did a few reunion Political Animal gigs, featuring Daniel Kitson reprising his role as God in their God sketch. Andy also kept up his Chocolate Milk Gang membership over those years, doing the Honourable Men of Art gig when it came back in 2008, appearing at some Kitson-compered Late 'n' Lives in the 00s, and at some Kitson-compered Chocolate Milk Gang reunion shows in later years (ZOCK, Fuckstorm 3000, Fuckstorm 3001). Andy did the impressions when Kitson told him to, even though by then he'd long dropped them from his regular act. Andy also performed new Edinburgh solo shows nearly every year from 2007 to 2019 (missing 2009, 2012, and 2015), usually with long convoluted titles in the style of Zaltzman and Oliver ("Life is convoluted, my comedy merely reflects that" - Andy Zaltzman).

In 2014, Andy started doing Satirist For Hire, a show he continued touring off and and on until 2022, in addition to his regular stand-up shows. In Satirist For Hire, the audience could write in with the date they were attending and a subject for Andy to satirize, and the show would consist of him satirizing audience-requested topics. It wasn't improv or anything, he'd get the topics in advance and write stuff about them, new stuff for every show. Which sounds like a ridiculous amount of work, but he was already doing that kind of thing for The Bugle, writing new stuff constantly. Some of these got recorded and released on filler weeks of The Bugle. Topics he got asked to satirize included all 721 Pokemon by name, the autumn equinox, the rebellion in Syria, and his own mother-in-law. He released a DVD of Satirist For Hire that was filmed in 2014, in which he performed the bespoke satire as well a "best of" his other old and new jokes, including some stuff that dates back to the Zaltzman and Oliver catalogue of the early 00s. It also has a DVD extra that's Andy just telling a weird story with no punchline, it's really annoyingly rambling and pointless, even for him. It's great.

During the original run of The Bugle, there were a lot of jokes in which John would tell a star-studded story about his life with celebrities in New York City, and Andy would say he'd had a good pastrami sandwich that week. There were slightly less funny parts at the end of the episodes, in which John would plug some big American event he was doing, and Andy would make a vague plea about small-time stand-up gigs that he couldn't sell. As The Bugle went on, Andy started doing slightly bigger stand-up gigs and sounding slightly less concerned about lack of tickets sold (due to him building up an audience of Bugle fans), though it still didn't look great when put next to John Oliver's projects.

Alongside this, Andy Zaltzman started getting jobs in the world of cricket as well. He was a massive, utterly obsessed cricket fan, made a lot of cricket references in his stand-up and on The Bugle, and at some point some people took notice and started inviting him to do cricket things. Spots on sports shows in which he'd analyze cricket. Cricket commentary. Collation of cricket stats. After several years of this, he started getting to travel for it, announcing on The Bugle that he'd be doing stand-up gigs in Bangladesh because he was going there anyway to attend cricket games and be paid to commentate on them. He doesn't have personal social media, but he does have a Twitter account that Tweets nothing but obscure cricket stats that he has personally worked out. What a weird guy, spending all his own time gathering information about one niche subject and then collating all the stuff from various sources and posting his findings on the internet. Nerd. You wouldn't catch me doing that.

Off the success of The Bugle, he started getting some other stuff. He was a regular host for a while on the Radio 4 panel show called 7 Day Sunday, where he worked with Chris Addison and Al Murray and Rebecca Front, I have frustratingly never been able to find episodes of that show. He got a Radio 4 mini-series called Andy Zaltzman’s History of the Third Millenium, which I have also never been able to find. He started appearing as a guest on The News Quiz somewhat regularly. He did that one episode of 8 Out of 10 Cats one time, and it was very awkward. Stewart Lee put him on Alternative Comedy Experience.

In 2008, John Oliver released a stand-up DVD called Terrifying Times. Andy flew to New York to appear in the recording of it. He came on stage a couple of times, for a few minutes each time, interacting with John so they could include some of their joint sketch material in the DVD. There's also a DVD extra that's a conversation between Zaltzman and Oliver, which is hilarious.

In 2012, Andy Zaltzman again went to New York, to perform some stand-up on John Oliver's New York Stand Up Show (along with Chocolate Milk Gang's David O'Doherty), a confusingly titled American television program with various comedians doing short sets compered by John Oliver. After years of relentlessly making fun of John on The Bugle for how he started saying "gotten" once he'd been in America for a bit, Andy got on American TV and immediately said the word "sports", which was adorable. He tried to fit in. It didn't really work and the crowd didn't know what to make of him, but he tried.

In the original run of The Bugle, Andy Zaltzman really honed his trademark style. It was marked by absurd analogies that treat any of the following like each other: sports, politics, Greek mythology, religion, current events, and occasionally a movie or something. He started doing "pun runs", where he'd spend several minutes doing one coherent monologue in which he'd make as many puns as possible themed around a single subject, usually while John Oliver screamed in agony in the background (you'd think it would stop being funny but it didn't, at one point he started using a little bell to mark each pun). Jokes with footnotes. Jokes where the joke is that the story is pointless. Everything he said carefully and tightly wrapped in at least 18 layers of irony. A running joke in which he'd introduce each Bugle episode by discussing something obscure that had happened in history on the day they were recording. So many cricket and snooker references.

An audio cryptic crossword that ran for the first thirty or so Bugle episodes, in which he'd read out a clue every week, but the clue wasn't to anything that made sense, it was just to some shit he'd made up in his head, and he never released a visual to accompany it. Yet it did work, some people at home actually solved it all and wrote it all out and it all fit together perfectly (that is how you do a crossword, Pemberton).

Massive truckloads of absurdity dumped with increasing urgency all over current events, as though he thought he could bury the dark realities under it. Zaltzman and Oliver's name for this absurdity was "bullshit"; it used to be a running joke that they'd advertise The Bugle by promising it would be completely free of facts, providing the best bullshit you've ever heard. Long, intricate bullshit that all ties together and keeps going just when you think there can't be any more to this story that Andy has entirely made up. Like the athletes he wrote about at university, no one can sue him for libel because they don't actually exist.

One time their producer Chris Skinner accused them of having an especially sweary Bugle, so far containing "twelve fucks and one cunt", and Andy said that's the Jewish view of the New Testament, and they (rightly) talked for like three years about how good a joke that was to come up with off the cuff. Andy's lapsed Jewish-ness is also a frequent topic of his jokes, usually how incredibly lapsed he is, being a massive fan of bacon sandwiches and one time his sister gave him an entire dead pig as a Christmas gift, a story that made it into a Daniel Kitson stand-up show as well as a lot of Bugle jokes about how in most cases that would be a hate crime.

There were also jokes throughout that Bugle run about John Oliver's increasingly high-profile career; Andy gave him the nickname Johnny Showbiz and cheerfully kept telling stories of pastrami sandwiches after John's stories about meeting Samuel L Jackson or whatever. I first listened to The Bugle a few months after I listened to the old Russell Howard/Jon Richardson BBC 6 Music shows, and those were basically an audio documentary of a friendship slowly cracking apart due to one party's jealousy of the other's increasing success (I mean, there were other issues too), so I found The Bugle an odd contrast at first. Because Andy made those jokes, but it sounded like there was absolutely no genuine jealousy behind them. If anything it went the other way, he seemed to vaguely pity John's weird hectic life, and John seemed to generally agree that this was too much celebrity and Andy was better off in his shed. I started wondering: how is Andy this okay with the disparity? Is he hiding the jealousy really well or is he made of stone?

A while into my the first listen-through of The Bugle, after wondering this for a few weeks, I came to the conclusion that the reason Andy Zaltzman sounded unbothered by John Oliver meeting Samuel L Jackson is that Andy Zaltzman truly, deep down to his core, did not want to meet Samuel L Jackson. That man was not impressed by anything in the world that's not a cricket stat or a bad pun, and he entirely meant it when he mercilessly mocked John for the embarrassing transgression of winning an Emmy. That wasn't masked bitterness, he just thought winning an Emmy was genuinely embarrassing. And John Oliver, once again, seemed to basically agree.

In 2011, there was the News of the World scandal, owned by News International, owned by The Times, which owned The Times of London, which owned TimeOnline, which funded The Bugle. Andy and John decided to really go after everyone behind the phone hacking scandal, for several weeks in a row. They didn't just talk about the shit journalists, they went for the entire system of tabloid press and its collusion with government, the people at the top of the both sides of that, everything that allowed this to happen. While doing this, they had a running joke in which they'd tap their mic and ask "Is this on?", implying that their overlords at The Times would cut their mic in retaliation for talking shit about Rupert Murdoch. Then The New York Times wrote an article about what they'd been doing, and they started to sound slightly more genuinely worried that this might get them in trouble.

A couple of months later, for what both sides called unrelated reasons, TimesOnline fired John and Andy, pulling The Bugle's funding. In a Bugle episode in December 2011, they said this might be their last one, they were scrambling to find alternative funding sources but might have to just end the podcast. The tone in that episode made the discrepancies in their careers clear. John repeatedly emphasized how much he loved The Bugle and everything they'd built together, and how he'd like to save it. While Andy had a lot more genuine desperation in his voice as he again used the term "Jack K. Shit" to describe what else he had going on in his career, he actually needed to #SaveTheBugle. You can see that as well in how careful they both were. John and Andy both said they were dropped for apolitical reasons, just lack of funding. But John messed around a bit and implied that this may not be the whole truth, while Andy sounded less willing to possibly get them in more trouble. Years later, in a 2023 episode of the rebooted Bugle, the subject of The Times came up, and Andy offhandedly mentioned that The Bugle used to be funded by The Times, until they were dropped "suspiciously shortly after" they made a bunch of Rupert Murdoch jokes. This was the first time Andy had acknowledged a possible connection, and I liked that, like a sign that he'd finally achieved enough success independently so he could afford to talk like that a bit too.

I made a compilation of this situation a couple of years ago. Most of the Bugle bits in it are John Oliver's lines, because the compilation was meant to contrast John Oliver's running joke on Last Week Tonight where he'd talk shit about HBO's parent company AT&T, referring to them as "business daddy" and gloating about how he could do that without getting in trouble, with the time in 2011 when he went on The Bugle and talked shit about their business daddy and did in fact get in trouble. Andy had a lot of good jokes about Rupert Murdoch and The Times during those episodes, they mostly aren't in this compilation because they weren't as relevant to the Bugle-LWT John Oliver Versus Business Daddy narrative, but the compilation still tells the story. Also I illustrated it with a bunch of amusing old Zaltzman and Oliver pictures.

In early 2012, they came back and announced that they had managed to sell enough listener subscriptions to keep The Bugle going independently. The Bugle continues to run that way to this day, free to listen to but funded by optional listener subscriptions, no ads (aside from a short time in 2018 when they partnered with Radiotopia and Andy had to read out those mattress ads and stuff, and you could hear his soul sinking into the floor, luckily that didn't last long), just because they created a product that's good enough to be worth its audience paying for. It also gets funded by merch sales and things. They have hats and socks.

The Bugle ran for a couple more glorious years as an independent podcast fronted by Zaltzman and Oliver. Then in summer 2013, Jon Stewart went away to film a movie and John Oliver filled in as a guest host for The Daily Show. John Oliver would do a fantastic job fronting America's flagship topical comedy show all week, and then come on The Bugle on Friday and lament how badly it was going and how he couldn't wait to get back to the sidelines where he belonged. But after that, as he'd proven his abilities as a host, HBO offered John Oliver his own weekly show. In December 2013, John Oliver proceeded to have a breakdown, but still left The Daily Show to start Last Week Tonight.

As shown in the compilation I've just linked, which is entitled Johnny Showbiz Gets His Own Show and Has a Breakdown, they promised at the time that this would absolutely not affect The Bugle. They promised! Repeatedly. I mean, they sounded at the time like they were trying to convince themselves and each other as much as the listeners, but still, they promised.

They mostly kept that promise for about a year, taking a few more breaks than usual throughout 2014 to accommodate John's busier schedule, but I don't think The Bugle declined in quality when it did go out. And given how few weeks off they'd had since October 2007, even The Bugle with extra breaks was still a hell of a lot of comedy material for them to turn over. They took a break for the whole summer in 2014, their first time taking more than a couple of weeks off in a row, but came back with a great run of episodes in the fall.

Andy did mention to Stuart Goldsmith, in a 2014 interview, that he was hoping he might be able to be involved with Last Week Tonight in some way, at some point. It's not clear whether he ever mentioned this to John Oliver. Seems like the sort of thing he should have maybe mentioned to John Oliver, instead of saving it for an uncharacteristically vulnerable podcast interview. But maybe he did ask John Oliver for that and it just didn't work out. He doesn't say. It certainly didn't end up happening.

Then, throughout 2015, The Bugle died a slow and incredibly painful death. They kept doing filler episodes, in which Andy would explain that John was busy, but promise he'd be back next week. Then, often, nothing, not even a filler episode, for weeks. Before 2015, they always put out an episode every week, usually a new episode, but if they didn't have one, there would be filler: an outtakes show or a best-of show or some recordings of stand-up or something. One time the producer Chris Skinner strung together a whole filler episode by doing things like interviewing their friend Alun Cochrane (back when Alun Cochrane was cool, Alun Cochrane is now no longer cool). But in 2015, they began to hit the limit on the number of weeks in a row when they could do filler episodes, so they started just putting out fuck all.

John Oliver did turn up for Bugle episodes occasionally in 2015, but when he did, he sounded increasingly distracted and like his heart wasn't in it. Which is fair enough, because we now know that he spent 2015 trying to write and present a research-intensive weekly HBO show, as well as caring for his wife while she had a high-risk pregnancy. It's as good an excuse as I've ever heard to not be able to talk shit about Bashar al-Assad or the band LMFAO with Andy Zaltzman every week (also, you have to give John Oliver credit for the fact that he did The Bugle very well for years despite never actually needing it, and was just in it for the love of the game). But he probably should have just said that, rather than clearly telling Andy all the time that he'd be back soon, which we know he was doing because Andy sounded like he believed it when he relayed that message to the listeners, and then it kept not happening.

To be fair, Andy also should have called time on the podcast way earlier - at the very least announcing an extended break, if not just acknowledging that it's not going to work anymore and ending it. Instead, Andy kept coming back to introduce filler episodes and promise us John would be back soon. And every once in a while he'd do a frustrated new episode with a checked-out John Oliver. I listened to the worst of this period of The Bugle within a couple of days, and that was rough, hearing it all at once like that. Had me yelling at my phone, "Oh my God, stop it! Just put it out of its fucking misery! This is an ex-podcast! Stop nailing it to a perch and trying to sell it back to us!"

Andy mentioned the "Jack K. Shit else going on" thing a couple of times as a reason for why he kept trying, but I don't even think that was true anymore. He had a big stand-up audience garnered by the success of The Bugle. He had his cricket career. He had regular radio work. He didn't have some big TV career or anything, but he had enough to be getting on with. Enough so he did not have to be as desperate as he got about trying to keep a podcast going when it was clearly over.

I think he was scared to try to do his comedy career without basing it around bouncing stuff off John Oliver. As his comedy career did have a history of spectacularly not working when he wasn't working with John.

Throughout 2015, Andy's increasing frustration could be heard in his voice during intros for the podcast filler episodes, and in the recordings of his 2015 stand-up that got released as said filler. He developed a joke in which he'd ask the audience who's heard of John Oliver, find the one or two people who said no, and shout, "Fuck you Percy Primetime, everyone in this room has heard of me!" "Percy Primetime" was a nickname spat with quite a bit less affection than the old "Johnny Showbiz". For the record I don't think they had a real falling out or anything, but there was some genuine bitterness there for the first time after all those years of fame disparity, it finally became clear that Andy Zaltzman's not actually made of stone.

In early 2016, The Bugle came back with one full episode that was actually very good, John and Andy were both really into it. John Oliver apologized for the many jokes he'd made in previous years about how funny it would be if Donald Trump ran for president, and they announced that The Bugle would be continuing for the forseeable future, just going once a month instead of once a week, so they could stop with the filler stuff and be more realistic about what was possible around new schedules. Then two months later, they came back and admitted this was not, in fact, realistic, and John was leaving The Bugle. Andy announced his plan to reboot the podcast in the fall, with John Oliver replaced by a rotating series of co-hosts from around the world. Andy sounded fairly terrified of this prospect.

The last episode of the John Oliver-era Bugle was number 295, and for reasons that Andy Zaltzman finds funny, he made the first episode of the new era episode 4001. This came out on October 24, 2016, and featured Hari Kondabolu as the guest co-host. Hari's a New York comedian whom I assume was recommended by John Oliver, as I can't imagine how else he and Andy would have crossed paths, and they sure didn't sound like two people who had ever encountered each other before. It was fucking awkward. It didn't help that it was a couple of months before the Donald Trump election, so a pretty intense time to try to just jump back into topical comedy with a "get to know the rebooted podcast" episode.

Basically, if Andy Zaltzman feared that his offbeat niche humour would not work without the one comedian in the world who was tailor-made to fit into it... those fears were not alleviated in that first episode. Hari Kondabolu is awesome, he has since become one of my favourite Bugle guests and I've gotten into his own stand-up, but that first time, he had no fucking idea what to make of Andy, and not much of an idea of what he'd signed up for with The Bugle. Andy had no idea how to talk to anyone in the world who isn't John Oliver. It was weird.

Episode 4002 featured Nish Kumar, who came in and immediately shouted "Fuck you Chris!", which was a running joke from the John Oliver-era Bugle (referring to producer Chris Skinner, John and Andy and the listeners would affectionately say "fuck you" to Chris a lot for reasons that made sense at the time), an instant way to assure the audience that he knew exactly what he'd signed up for. Nish had been listening to The Bugle since it started when he was still doing student comedy, and as far as I can tell, he'd pretty much climbed the ranks of the comedy industry in the hopes of someday getting to touch the garment of his heroes Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver (he might have had one or two reasons besides that, but it was mainly that one). And he got his wish. He's now the second most frequent co-host of the Bugle 4000-series (after Alice Fraser), and one time he got to play football with John Oliver and they got into fights on the pitch.

The Bugle continued on shaky ground for the first 25 episodes or so, really for the first 50. Andy has said since that he knows those episodes were rough, that he'd got so comfortable in his familiar rapport with John Oliver that he just couldn't generate the same thing with people he didn't know as well, and he didn't know anyone as well as John. Though it clearly wasn't just about who he knew as well as John, but who he could comfortably work with as well as John (which was no one). Helen Zaltzman came on a few of those early episodes, and she was a fantastic guest, really funny and took Andy to task and held her own on every subject, but it is incredible how little chemistry Andy Zaltzman managed to have with his own sister. He brought in Anuvab Pal, a comedian from Mumbai whom Andy knew from his time covering cricket over there, they were friends in real life, but they often sounded like they'd never met before. The only person Andy sounded like he knew how to talk to at all was Nish, whom he'd known for a few years through stand-up by the time the Bugle 4000-series started. The Nish Kumar episodes were the best ones, especially early on, but it wasn't anywhere near the levels of Zaltzman and Oliver chemistry.

Andy has said in interviews since that he was struggling during that time, and that started occasionally making its way into the Bugle content, which previously had rarely been particularly personal. At the end of 2016, Andy Zaltzman did a year-in-review stand-up show (something he did every year for a while, a whole stand-up show written to only be performed one time to mark the end of the year), and (on the subject of reviewers who aren't Steve Bennett), Dominic Maxwell in The Times (fuck off, Times) wrote a review in which he called Andy "John Oliver's left-behind sidekick". Andy brought that up on The Bugle several times, citing the "sidekick" line with real bitterness, and rightly so. Partly because he has never been anyone's sidekick (except maybe Daniel Kitson's once in a while at old Late 'n' Live gigs), and partly because that was a solo stand-up show that was not affiliated with The Bugle and definitely had nothing to do with John Oliver, so he shouldn't have been put in John Oliver's shadow in a context like that. It was actually a 4-star review, Maxwell liked the show. But the review's first paragraph was:

Why has John Oliver become a star in America while his old partner in seemingly shambolic yet secretly serrated political satire, Andy Zaltzman, remains a cult comedian with a sideline as a cricket stats man? Is it because Zaltzman, with his receded Harpo Marx explosion of hair, is less telegenic than Oliver, with whom he co-hosted the podcast The Bugle until last year? Is it because, although he is every bit as grounded in reality as Oliver, Zaltzman is a more devotedly loopy joke-writer, so that he always adds his own twist of wry absurdism to our leaders’ already skewed logic?

Starting a four-star review with that is one hell of a backhanded compliment, no matter how positive you go on to be about the show itself. I assume that review was the main one - probably among plenty of other reviews that had built up Andy's resentment over time, but that Maxwell one was clearly the straw that broke his back - that led Andy to record this "interview with himself" to put in the "in the bin" section at the beginning of a Bugle episode in early 2017.

So the stone was starting to show serious cracks at that point. At one point in 2017, Andy plugged his upcoming run at MICF, saying it would be good to perform in Australia because his career could "flush down the toilet in the other direction" for a bit. Nish Kumar laughed way too hard at that, I remember saying to my phone, "Nish, stop! Can't you see he's having a breakdown? Stop laughing at that and give the man a hug!"

It was hard to listen to the most stoically-dedicated-to-irony-and-bullshit man I'd ever heard have a breakdown, but things eventually got steadier. Andy did some episodes from MCIF in Melbourne, and on Bugle episode 4023, in April 2017, he brought in Australian comedians Tom Ballard and Alice Fraser. Tom and Alice both became Bugle regulars, but Alice especially started doing it all the time. Alice, like Nish, told stories of how she'd been a dedicated listener to the original run of The Bugle since before she'd started stand-up, and you can see Andy's influence on her comedic style (you can see it in Nish's too - John and Andy both influencing Nish a lot, while Alice is a lot more like Andy than she is like John).

The inclusion of Alice Fraser changed the game for the rebooted Bugle, as she quickly became a very frequent presence, and Andy developed as good a rapport with her as he could have with almost anyone. There are some sweet moments in her early episodes when Alice would pull out some Zaltzman-esque puns or absurd analogies, and Andy would sound genuinely touched that someone else was into his weird niche humour. He immediately started including her in some bit parts of his stand-up shows too, whenever he was in Australia or she was in England.

The Bugle also got better once they started doing two guests at a time instead of just one. Andy has said since that at some point he realized he and John Oliver had good enough chemistry to carry an entire episode, but he couldn't manage that with anyone else. However, he could do it if there were three people, so the guests could interact with each other too, and the three different types of interactions could get them through the 40-45 minutes more easily. They also started doing Bugle live shows, which went well, got toured in England and even in America.

Since then, The Bugle has grown into a thing that is new and very different from its original form, but also very good. As of May 2024 they've just hit episode 4304, having recently passed the 295 episodes that Andy did with John Oliver. Its format has changed. People still turn up with pre-written stuff, but it's not the same perfectly choreographed/somehow improvised dance of tightly written material that it used to be. It's got a wider range of guests, more diverse topics, fewer insular in-jokes. Some other format changes too, like dropping the listener correspondence. But a lot of the guest co-hosts breathe new life into it, bring different perspectives and styles of humour, contribute more than the original version with only two people ever could. It's introduced me to lots of great comedians from various countries (well, mainly Britain and America and Australia, but a couple from India, a couple from Ireland, one I really like from NZ), I've gotten into a lot of people's stand-up because I liked them on The Bugle. They've also created spinoff podcasts, like The Gargle, hosted by Alice Fraser.

The Bugle 4000 has brought in a bunch of comedians from the younger generation, but also let Andy bring in some old friends. David O'Doherty and Josie Long of the Chocolate Milk Gang have done it a few times, they make top quality episodes. Mark Steel's been on a bunch of times, who used to do the earliest days of Political Animal and of course is a king of Radio 4 along with Andy. Mark and Andy are great together, you can hear how much they enjoy each other's company, to the point where part of me dreads the day when Andy decides to be nice to his buddy Mark and let Mark bring his son to work. I don't think they'd do that though, The Bugle has standards. No Elliot Steel, please.

A big highlight of Andy bringing back old friends is Chris Addison, who worked on The Department back in 2004-06. Addison stopped doing stand-up years ago as he got a bigger career in acting and directing and things like that, and he's said he loves doing The Bugle because it gives him a chance to write comedy material the way he doesn't anymore. And because it's the only time he does that, he's not throwing his scraps at a topical podcast while spreading ideas across multiple platforms. He's coming up with solid gold, and letting The Bugle have all of it. Every time he comes on, he does his homework so well beforehand that the other comedians, including Andy, have to raise their game to keep up.

As for Zaltzman himself, he had some shaky times for his comedy material in those early reboot days. He started seeming burned out from writing so much without getting anywhere, and was re-using a lot of concepts for a while. It wasn't bad, but he did stop innovating for a while after John Oliver disappeared. The absurd scenarios in his monologues got a bit by-the-numbers.

However, as The Bugle found its feet in the new era, Andy broke through that and started writing better than ever before. He, as they say in sports and video games, jumped levels. Suddenly came out of a plateau and immediately jumped to a much higher spot than one would expect, like the slow and steady escalation of talent suddenly caught up to him all at once. Like magic. That is one of my favourite things about sports, when an athlete suddenly jumps levels, like magic. Andy jumped levels a couple of times in the late 2010s, and it was so cool to listen to. A big part of it was the way he'd tie together lots of ideas at once instead of hitting them one at a time, the way he'd make connections that turned his monologues into more than the sum of their parts.

He really, really hit a stride in 2019, as the world went to shit around him, and he started incorporating a bit more genuine emotion than he ever had before. So many emotions, all of them various flavours of searing fury at the state of the government. At first the bits of emotion were added unexpectedly, like he was experimenting with it, but then he learned how to blend it seamlessly into his previous knack for absurd ironic bullshit, it was amazing and I think he was growing into one of the best comic writers there is.

I sort of have a theory about that, which unfortunately gets me into a sports analogy so I hope I can be indulged in that briefly. As a coach, I am very familiar with the phenomenon where two athletes work with almost no one but each other for years. In some ways it makes them much better than they could be otherwise, because they're constantly being challenged by someone who knows their style inside and out, so they have to constantly evolve in order to stay ahead of the other person figuring out how to counter what they do, pushing each other to higher levels of the sport. But in other ways, they often end up with big holes in their game, because they never learn to respond to anything their main training partner doesn't do.

I think that may have slightly happened with Zaltzman and Oliver. And more to Zaltzman than to Oliver, because John was doing all kinds of other things, writing for The Daily Show with lots of people who weren't Andy Zaltzman. While the main thing Andy did was write for The Bugle. Even in his solo stand-up career, most of his shows were the best bits of what he came up with for The Bugle, so they were still written first for the purpose of bouncing off John Oliver.

So much of the beauty in the original Bugle was the way John and Andy found each other so funny, they were writing to make each other laugh. But this meant Andy Zaltzman was restricted to material that would fit his established role in a double act. The role of being the intellectual one who comes at things sideways while John tackles them head-on. That role did not leave him space to experiment with things like genuine emotion, even in spots where that could make a routine stronger. I can think of a few Zaltzman routines from 2019 that wouldn't have worked on the original Bugle, not because they wouldn't make John Oliver laugh, but because they wouldn't really have complemented John's stuff in the right way. The original Bugle had a perfect balance of comedic styles, which was what made it great, but you can't go throwing curve balls at a balance.

So my theory is that, once Andy got away from being restricted to the perfectly chosen double act role, and he then got over his slump from when he was upset about losing the double act/possibly worried he couldn't do it on his own, he had a couple of levels that were ready to be jumped. The Bugle released a bunch of the recording from Andy Zaltzman's year-in-review stand-up show from the end of 2019, and it's incredible. The "best of" from an absolutely stellar Bugle year, taking the strongest bits from all those weeks he'd spent writing, and tying them around some structure. It's one of the best fucking things I've ever heard. Andy Zaltzman does everything at once in it.

In 2019, Miles Jupp left The News Quiz, a major topical comedy panel show on Radio 4 (I'm pretty sure it's the major comedy show on Radio 4). Angela Barnes, Nish Kumar, and Andy Zaltzman - three of The News Quiz's most frequent guests at the time - each spent some time guest hosting it, as they applied for the role of permanent host. Andy got the job. He mentioned this on The Bugle during the week before his first episodes of The News Quiz as permanent host, and did it with his usual flair for self-promotion, which is almost none, he just said it's happening. Fortunately Nish Kumar was on that Bugle episode with him, and Nish insisted on interrupting Andy to tell the listeners what a big deal The News Quiz is, that Andy won't brag about it but he got a huge job on a flagship show after years and years of smaller spots on radio shows and earning his place there, and it's really cool. It was adorable to hear Nish hyping up Andy for getting a job for which (Nish didn't mention this part) Nish Kumar had also applied.

In October 2022, John Oliver came back for a special Bugle 15th birthday episode, just him and Andy for half an hour, and it made me have to pull my hat down on the bus so people couldn't see that I had tears in my eyes from laughter (honestly, I should have anticipated that and not listened to it on the bus). It had been years since they'd worked together, and they mentioned during that episode that they hadn't seen each other in years and hadn't even had much contact since the end of The Bugle, but somehow they fell right back into the perfect rhythm. It's nice to know the magic's still there, even if they're not using it anymore.

So that pretty much brings you up to speed with where Andy Zaltzman's at now. For the last few years, his career has been hosting The Bugle in its expanded form that includes live shows sometimes, hosting The News Quiz, collating cricket stats and still doing lots of cricket-related work. He hasn't done a new Edinburgh hour since 2019, but he toured Satirist For Hire in 2022. He definitely can't describe his career with the term "Jack K. Shit going on" anymore.

Quick question, just asking for a friend - how many thousand words do you have to write before something goes from being "quite long for a Tumblr post" to "quite short for a biographical book"?

In fall 2023, Andy Zaltzman mentioned that he "might" have some new stand-up to announce soon. That surprised me, because to be honest, between The News Quiz and The Bugle and the cricket, he's fucking busy these days, and he must be making enough money to not need stand-up. He turns 50 this October. He's been slowing down the stand-up over the last few years, after about twenty years of doing it constantly. I thought he might be winding down that side of his career.

But suddenly, he's mentioning possible new stand-up in 2024. He mentioned it briefly in the fall and then didn't bring it up for so long that I started to think he must have changed his mind about it. But then, in spring 2024, he suddenly started talking about live gigs again. He booked some WIPs in May and June and plugged them on The Bugle. He slowly, with his usual level of self-promotional skills, barely admitted to the fact that he has a whole stand-up tour planned for November 2024. "November 2024?" I thought. "That seems odd. Andy rarely plans so far ahead, he's usually scrambling to plug gigs he forgot he has next week. And now, when I'd thought he might be leaving stand-up behind, he's planning an entire tour many months in advance. Why did he suddenly decide to do a whole big stand-up tour again, and once he did decide that, why did he plan it for so late in the year? I mean, I'm not complaining. More Zaltzman stand-up is great! But it's a break from his usual pattern."

That is what I thought, to myself, as I listened to his updates on The Bugle. And then I sat in the break room at work and I refreshed a page and saw the Taskmaster season 18 lineup and I jumped into the air and all became clear. He's capitalizing. Andy "No Commercial Promotion Skills Whatsoever" Zaltzman is going to capitalize on his fall 2024 Taskmaster bump in popularity by following it up with a tour. I'm so fucking pleased for him.

Guys. It's going to be so good. He's so good, you're all going to love him, I promise. Do you know what it will do to Taskmaster to have someone who can run circles around Alex Horne in the field of analyzing everything via obscure statistics? He's going to make Alex look like an amateur. He's going to have an explanation for every single thing that happens and none of the explanations will be rooted in any kind of reality but they will all make internal sense.

Oh God, people are going to have to talk about him. It is so funny to listen to people try to work out what to make of Andy Zaltzman, particularly if they're not in Andy's carefully curated niche of people whom he's decided he can manage to talk to. Ed Gamble is going to talk about Andy Zaltzman. 17 years after sharing a stage with Andy at Late 'n' Live where Andy declared Marek Larwood the most fuckable member of We Are Klang (he was incorrect, but not for the reasons Tumblr thinks, I would like to immediately apologize for saying that), Greg Davies will have to judge whatever absurd bullshit comes out of Andy's brain. There will be so many cricket references.

Have I mentioned that a cornerstone of Andy Zaltzman's comedy is turning everything into a sport? That's part of his absurd analogies, he analyzes everything as though it's sports. And I love people who analyze Taskmaster as though it's sports. Andy Zaltzman is going to go on Taskmaster and treat it like sports. Oh it's going to be so much fun!

I cannot wait. I cannot fucking wait. I've just realized he's going to have to plug Taskmaster on The Bugle. That'll be weird. Who's on TV now, Johnny Showbiz? I mean, still John, still very much John Oliver, but Andy as well now! You did it, Andy! It only took 17 years!

[ashleywool]

Look...I'm no statistician, but...

I HIGHLY doubt it's a coincidence that Tony viewership dropped 14.6% the year they snubbed the ONLY musical in history that represented and celebrated the most passionate, dedicated, and under-appreciated evangelists of the Broadway fandom.

This isn't a slight against any of the other folks who were represented on that stage. They are my friends and colleagues and they deserve all the recognition they are getting and more. This isn't even a judgment of the Broadway League. I know how this stuff works. I know the point of the awards show is to get national audiences interested in coming to New York, and that the odds of an early-season closure getting nominations in an already-packed season is slim to none, and we were far from the only ones left out. (I'm still especially flabbergasted that Harmony got ignored. It was, in my expert opinion, about as perfect as a musical could possibly get.)

Even still, there were plenty of reasons to tune in, between all the wonderful shows that WERE deservedly represented, and the fact that it's only the second full Broadway season since the shutdown.

I can understand the financial constraints that are still resulting in overall lower grosses/attendance at the shows themselves, but for Tony viewership to be down 14.6% from last year? When it's accessible on more platforms and in more parts of the world than ever before?

You're never gonna convince me that that only happened because of Father's Day, and had nothing to do with ticking off a giant sector of diehard Broadway fans, many of whom had already made active plans to see HTDIO but never got to go.

But, like so many other things I know about the power, passion, and prevalence of the autistic community, I can't prove it. It might not be proven within my lifetime, and even if it is, the people who don't wanna see it will still ignore it. Or try to frame it as a "me" problem. That's just something I have to live with, and my heart and logical brain know that that's okay, even if my ego doesn't like it.

I am optimistic about HTDIO going to London, though. The UK theatre scene has its own set of issues, but "cultural de-prioritization of theatre" isn't one of them, and neither is "everything being controlled by the landlords."

I found out that you don't even need a deposit or show proof of income to rent an apartment there, and credit scores are NOT A THING. The cost of living is still quite high, and the West End actor salaries are not what they should be, but it makes me happy to know that at least none of those actors are going to have to ask for a $9K salary advance just so they can move into the neighborhood. And if they happen to be an off-the-books gig worker on the side, or they're receiving unemployment at the time of the application, it DOESN'T MATTER. The landlords don't care where the money comes from, or how good their tenants have been at paying other people on time in the past, or how much debt their tenants have, as long as they get the rent on time every month. What a dang concept.

At the end of the day, whatever happens or doesn't happen or could/would/should have happened, I'm still deeply proud of our show, I still love the craft and the culture of musical theatre, and I love the Broadway community more than I even realized was possible. I don't think there's any force in the universe powerful enough to make those things less true.

Life is always gonna be hard and unfair, but theatre people are my favorite people to do hard and unfair things with.

[art-that-fucks-you-up-tournament]

Stats Part 3

Now that Round 3 is over, we're down to 32 (well, 33) remaining artworks which feels about time to check in on how our statistics are doing!

And if you're not interested in statistics, I (Mod Salix) wanted to talk about the polls. You may have noticed that I've been trying to keep to 4 polls a day, which would mean that Round 4 is only going to be 4 days, and Round 5 would post everything in two days. Starting in Round 6, we'll probably re-institute week long polls. Hopefully none of us will lose track of what day to post the next round!

We have 20 artworks by male artists, 10 by female artists, and 4 by groups or unknowable entities! And of those, one person is Black, two are Aboriginal (one of whom is Mestizo and Kichwa, the other of whom is Aboriginal Australian), one is Asian-American (and two are Chinese living in China as opposed to living somewhere they're a minority), and one is Indian-British. And also three are left from gay men about the AIDS crisis, in addition to the AIDS memorial quilt, and one lesbian comic.

There are six American artists (including the Asian-American mentioned above), and three Chinese artists (including the Asian-American mentioned above), as well as three Russians (including Ilya Repin, who was born in the future Ukraine and lived near St. Petersburg), technically two different pieces by the same Dutch artist (hi van Gogh), and one each from Argentina, Serbia, Ecuador, Colombia, Canada, Italy, Northern Ireland, Poland, Australia, Finland, Germany, France, and Britain. And one artist I have listed as Denmark/Germany/France, because August Friedrich Schenck was born in a place that was Denmark at the time, Germany now, and worked mostly in France.

Of the pieces with known locations, eight are in the United States (four specifically in New York), two each in Australia and Russia, and one each in Argentina, Finland, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and one in a private collection.

There are two archaic pieces of art, Judith is our last standing piece from anything between archaic and 1843, 8 pieces of art from the 1800s, although five are from 1878 to 1896, one from 1903, two from the 70s or 80s, 5 from the 90s, four from the 00s, four from the span of 2014 to 2016, and three from the last two years. And two unknown dates and the AIDS memorial quilt which is still being added to.

There are 15 paintings, 7 installation arts, one comic, one photograph, one cave art, one sketch, one tattoo, and one fiber art slash installation. And the most common subject of the art are five queer related art pieces, although I have four each I summed up as either horror or grief/anguish.

And, lastly, someone sent in an ask in like Round 1 asking about statistics regarding whether being in first or second place in the poll biased anything. I'm not actually a statistician, so I can't answer that question, but I did compile the numbers of how many first-positioned vs second-positioned arts won! Surprisingly, Round 1 had 64 firsts to 63 seconds (and one tie), Round 2 had 29 to 35, and Round 3 had 15 to 17. Technically speaking that's not a large enough sample size to determine bias but it's... interesting?.

I was going to make a scatterplot featuring the number of votes in each poll to track engagement, but I haven't actually figured out how to do one in Google Sheets yet so maybe at the end of the bracket.

[evidence-based-activism]

feminists are trying to defend Lucy letby the vile woman who killed babies, too bad for you she has been found guilty. https://apple.news/AYaBFIXxAQ1KtwSC2w-84kA

Hello Anon -

I'm going to answer this in parts:

Are feminists trying to defend Lucy Letby?

I searched for any evidence of this and found none. If you have any evidence that this is occurring you'll have to provide sources for it. However, I've searched for news articles, organization statements, and social media posts and found absolutely no evidence of this. (The link you provided is just to a generic news article on the topic. Nothing about a feminist defense on the topic.)

Is anyone trying to defend Lucy Letby?

There are some people saying that a "miscarriage of justice" has taken place. However, they're explicitly indicating that they don't know if Lucy Letby is innocent. They have an issue with the way the prosecution used statistical and scientific evidence, and with the defense's inadequate response to this misuse of evidence.

Essentially, they are saying that - regardless of Letby's innocence or guilt - she received an inadequate defense and should be retried. (This article (archived link) introduces the arguments, although its tone suggests the arguments lack merit.)

I'm not going to go into the problems they've identified (with one exception, which I'll address next), but if you're interested in a breakdown of the issues an article by The Guardian (archived link) and another by The Telegraph (archived link) discuss the identified problems with the case's statistics/science (and some counter-arguments). The first is from a left-leaning source and the second from a right-leaning source, but they essentially address the same information.

One of the primary points behind this argument is that the prosecution misused statistical data. One of the primary advocates is Statistician Richard Gill. An important note about him, is that Letby is not the first person he's made this argument for. From the first article:

Seven years before anyone had heard of Letby, Gill successfully campaigned for the retrial of Dutch nurse Lucia de Berk. De Berk stood trial for serial murder in 2003 and was convicted of four murders and three attempted murders. In 2010, after a campaign led by whistleblowers and statisticians including Gill, the case was sent back to court. De Berk was exonerated; her case is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Dutch history. (Emphasis added.)

This same issue has apparently arisen frequently enough that the "Royal Statistical Society" wrote and published a report ("Healthcare serial killer or coincidence? Statistical issues in investigation of suspected medical misconduct.") on the topic, which essentially advised people to consult a statistician before using statistics for a criminal case. Neither the prosecution or the defense followed this recommendation.

That doesn't necessarily make these arguments correct ... just because he's been right before doesn't mean he's right this time. There's room for doubt in almost any type of evidence (hence why the juries are asked to consider "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" instead of "absolute certainty in guilt").

All in all, some field experts are indicating they believe the prosecutions evidence was flawed and the defense's response failed to address these flaws in Letby's defense. As a result, they believe Letby should be retried. Notably, they are not suggesting she be immediately exonerated or released.

Importantly, this argument is not based on feminism or Letby being female. It's specifically a scientific/statistical argument. As such, your assertion that "feminists are trying to defend Lucy Letby" is still incorrect.

Bonus: general serial killer statistics.

To try and keep both posts a reasonable length, I have made a separate post about Sex Differences in Serial/Mass Murder.

[navree]

This whole thing is frightening. Do you possibly have any words of wisdom?

If you're not Donald Trump you're gonna live to see tomorrow, so there's that (he'll live too, it was literally just the ear, unfortunately for my belief in karma, he is fine).

In all seriousness, I'm not an election forecaster or statistician in any capacity so I can't say how this'll Affect The Election but in my view, it's not gonna be much. The sympathy vote is not really a thing anymore, it hasn't been a thing since Dubya so I'm not concerned about that. I don't think it's gonna move actual undecideds one way or another, and people who are already committed to one party aren't going to be swayed in a new direction either because polarization is simply too entrenched in political parties these days. And he can't do much "look how I'm ailing" shit because his ear got grazed and that is literally it. Not to mention the election is five months away, which in politics is the equivalent to like ten million years. Remember when Joe Biden had that bad debate performance that sent everyone into a tailspin for no reason? That was two weeks ago, but it feels like a decade, because news cycles, especially in politics, go really fast. Last month we were literally still talking about the impact of the college protests on the election. Yeah I bet you already forgot about those, didn't you?

The only thing that really concerns me is that his base is already violent and whacked out of their minds, and they'll use this, and any hysteria he and his allies drum up about it because they're incapable of not doing so, to promote more violence against people they perceive as enemies. And we know they're already capable, because one of them literally tried to beat Paul Pelosi to death with a hammer (another point in the 'sympathy vote doesn't exist' column because did that man trying to break into Nancy Pelosi's home to kidnap and torture her before trying to kill her husband when she wasn't around sway anyone to be more in favor of Democrats/less in favor of Republicans? no, it didn't), so I wouldn't be shocked if some idiot tried something in retaliation. Which is cause for concern, yes, because it is always important to remember that Republicans as a whole are violent and bloodthirsty and do not see their opponents as people (and that is just another example of why both parties are NOT in fact the same, tankies), but use that to galvanize you into working as hard as you can to get Dems in office and support Democratic policies and platforms and officials.

Ultimately anon, I am not someone who catastrophizes, and I also know that I can only control me and you can only control you. So just remember to focus on what you can do and how you react to things. And if you need to log off, log off. Keep your peace, and ultimately, I think just remember that this all seems new and exciting and insane because it's fresh and happening now, but we also felt the same about that time he got COVID. That became old hat fast, and odds are this will too.

[yesterdays-xkcd]

For smaller numbers he has to SAVE lives. The birthrate channel is even more of a mixed bag.

IPoD [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[Black Hat sits at a computer. Cueball stands behind him.] Black Hat: You see, statisticians communicate using IPoD -- IP over Demographics. For example, the header of the next packet I send will be encoded into the New Jersey death rate.

Cueball: So you're going to hack the census bureau and change the number of reported deaths? Black Hat: Guess again. Black Hat: Hey, have you seen my crossbow?

[csykora]

hi csykora! i appreciate this may not be your field of academic interest but as the pre eminent hockey professor i was wondering if you could give any insight as to why some draft classes are just stacked and others are ??? thinking about the absurdity that is the 2015 draft class vs the 2012 class for example

This is a great question! I have 500 answers. :)

I'm not a statistician, so I can't really talk about how particular draft classes are different, but there are a lot of reasons why they are. It's sort of a stew made up of some amount of the following reasons:

the annual draft isn't a snapshot of all the hockey players born in a certain year: it's a sampler of American and Canadian players who were between 18 and 20, and international players between 18 and 21, at a certain point in a certain year. While the top prospects we talk most about do often get taken in the first draft they're eligible for, keep in mind that this is a large and often overlapping group. That means that random differences between kids born in certain years can get folded together in an odd way.

whether you're taken in your first year and if so, where, depends on how much NHL decision makers have seen and heard about you. Teams judge prospects based on the assessments of the Central Scouting Service, and by the team's own scouts. The CSS is meant to be an unbiased resource for the whole league: they're the ones who publish out the twice-yearly draft reports ranking players, and who organize the Combine. (It's worth noting that while other major sports franchises also have league scouting departments to assist their teams, hockey is unique in that it publishes the scouting reports publicly and people, like normal members of the Canadian population with families and jobs, read them. Other sports fans just do not care about ranking prospects like this.) The CSS has about 5-10 full time scouts and 15 part time scouts in North America, and hires 6 more scouts from the European Scouting Service out of Finland to watch European and continental games.

You will notice that the CSS doesn't have a Russian wing. A couple of the ESS's 6 scouts rotate cover it for them, but--and I don't know if you all know this--Russia is large as hell. CSS scouts work long hours and travel ludicrous distances just to cover some of the US and Canada--and even then they manage to make Colton Parayko-sized mistakes. I want to be clear that I respect individual scouts' work, but the CSS reports are fundamentally flawed.

So each team will also hire some number of scouts to hunt for them. Several NHL teams still don't have a Russian scout--meaning an NHL team is ahead of the game if they have one. Russian hockey players barely manage to travel across Russia to get to all of their own games. And that's Russia, one of the richest mines for talent! Most teams don't have consistent scouting in lots of places like Czech Republic, Slovakia, etc. Scouts typically go to international championships and then might follow up on a player who has already been identified as promising. Sometimes while they do that they catch a random glimpse of other players. Vítek Vaněček, for example, is now a sturdy NHLer who wasn't on anybody's radar and would never have been drafted at all if he hadn't happened to be in the same city at the same time as Jakub Vrána.

The team scouts still have to start their hunt based on previous scouting, and some peer pressure. According to Serge Savard, "When Central Scouting comes out with their first-round list, all the scouts think, 'Oh, Christ, I better get this player in my list or I’ll look bad.'" Sure, you want to find a hidden gem before somebody else does, but on the flipside nobody wants to be the person who wasted days of travel and your boss' time by going to freaking Krasnoyarsk to watch some kid play and he turns out to be just okay. There are a lot of boys in Alaska who aren't Colton Parayko. That risk vs. reward leads to a happy medium of mundanity. NHL scouting is, by their own admission, accurate about 50% of the time.

So, did you make it to World Juniors? How did your team do this year, and maybe the year before (since again, we're looking at a draft eligible window)? How did your regular season team do? (And was that because of you, or in spite?) We often talk as though the World Juniors team are the best young players, but realistically if a young player's regular season team is strong and makes it deep into the season, maybe because he's helping them, sometimes they don't want to send him off to tournaments. Youth teams don't really care if one of their players gets on a national team or gets drafted to the NHL--maybe if he does he'll bring some good reputation for their program, or maybe not. In the CHL, it's fuck him really, he'll be 21 and age out anyway. Internationally, going to the NHL might bring a ton of money back to the community, but if there's a local pro team then they can't make money off him. They aren't inclined to be helpful. So it's not that all WJC players are actually bad, but there's a back-and-forth tug of pressures on which young players get on the international stage.

(This is especially a problem for young goalies: getting to the WJC really depends on their team being good enough that they look good, bad enough that they can leave in the middle of the season, or somehow both. In 2007, one of Canada's World Junior goalies put up a pretty miserable .833 save percentage. That was only to be expected--the reason he was available for the tournament was because he'd only won 42 out of the last 115 games for his regular season team, so they weren't exactly busy. As a result, he was drafted in the fourth round. His tandem partner for that tournament managed a more respectable .918, which had been about his average for the last few regular seasons, and was taken by the Avalanche in the second round, inside the top 50 prospects. One of these two players now has a Vezina, a Jennings, a Stanley Cup, and is named Braden Holtby. The other is Trevor Cann, who probably nobody outside Ontario remembers but me, and for sure nobody in Colorado remembers because he's never been there.)

Now, that's not scouting or teams' faults. It's also that 18 to 21 is a mind-bogglingly stupid age to predict young men's physical abilities. It seems like the idea that the human brain isn't "finished developing" until your early twenties has become a relatively common tidbit of science that people talk about on the internet--what I wish people would remember is that's as or more true of young men's freaking skeletons. Those boys are half-baked! There's a relatively wide range in when people reach their full heights, but your skeleton cannot fully mature until you do. In testosterone-driven development, your long bones grow from the soft growth plates at each end, until a hormonal shift stops them, causing the ends of the long bones to harden and thicken. (This process is why people with high T tend to have broader hands and bigger knuckles, in comparison to a similar person with lower T. Note that I phrase it this way because we all have testosterone.) Until that happens, bones are vulnerable to cracking at the growth plates, and muscles which generally attach at the ends of your long bones can become too strong for the bone under them. You really just do not know for sure how strong a boy is going to be until this process finishes, which could be in his mid teens but generally is in his early twenties. And as long as he's growing and his weight distribution is changing, he's going to have to keep adjusting how he moves. Some boys just go through a real gangly awkward stage, and that doesn't mean much of anything. (Speaking of things that don't mean much: the Combine. A lot of the tests aren't relevant, the ones that are, like the Wingate, aren't useful unless you have technical knowledge to interpret them, and it's a bad time to be testing boys anyway). As a pretty predictable result, the NHL tends to favor not just tall men, but men who got tall young, which is actually a pretty specific subset. Parayko grew six inches after he was 18.

Teams and their scouts follow trends, just like the rest of us. They want their own Carey Price, so they look for boys built like Price, who move like Price, even if maybe there's a different shape and style of goalie who would work just as well. They want tall boys. They want players with a certain body fat percentage, which means less than nothing. They want players with muscle in certain areas, so much that young players today do certain exercises just to look the right way. Maybe one year there's a really great smaller player, or a really great defenseman, and everyone gets excited about that guy but also knows they can't all have him, so they look closer than they usually would at other players in that 'type' to try to find a good alternative, and they drive up interest in that type of player.

And players make trends themselves. I think the biggest single explanation for 2015 is that, most of the time, playing either with or against a good player makes you a better player too. From a skill-development perspective, it's not actually the competition that matters, it's not about Eichel trying to beat McDavid, it's just about proximity. We learn from watching each other, being near each other. If you have a guy on your line who has already mastered a skill that you haven't yet, you'll learn it from him faster than you probably would have on your own. If you play against him, you'll learn it too. And when you're a younger kid playing near someone slightly older, who's more physically developed and therefore has had a chance to master more skills, you'll also tend to learn those skills. So again, we're talking about this range from 18 to 21, which I think can give you almost a hangover effect that stretches from year to year: you have a player like Mitch Marner who happens to be old enough to land in 2015, and then you have a younger teammate who had the opportunity to learn with him like Matthew Tkachuk who lands in 2016. (Not the greatest example because I'm sure Tkachuk would have been Tkachuk regardless, but my point is there is a clustering effect, most famously in Warroad, but also in Toronto and other places. Tom Wilson grew up learning to play from his future teammate Devante Smith-Pelly, and so on.)

Also, last but never least, the injuries. They completely change how we feel about a class retroactively. We really can't assume that just because some kid who was drafted high never panned out, he was never that great: very often there just wasn't a place available for him, and then he got injured in some quietly catastrophic way.

[somecunttookmyurl]

people on my "insurance is literally betting and you're almost certainly not going to win against statisticians who are determined to cheat" post like "well MY insurance paid out and ended up saving me money soooo" like that isn't the exact same vibe as the guy who happened to win $5,000 at a casino once insisting it's not rigged

[rametarin]

Discourse in a world without internet.

I'm actually glad that, "kids today don't know what it was like" exists when it comes to social and political discourse. Because a great deal of manufactured ignorance hinged on the idea that the vast majority of us didn't have access to information, we were gatekept out by simply not having access to people in our social networks that knew certain information, and those that did know it, had next to zero chance to meet and interact with anyone that actually knows that information.

So they would be free to declare stuff with confidence and authority on the subjects of, say, rape statistics, and TERFs would spin that into a feminist narrative about how all men are evil, vile monsters who were bad just because of their Y chromosome, as well as say that creatured a bad nurture culture of patriarchy. And unless you were a statistician with degrees, even if you did the laymans thing, did your own research, they'd disregard any dissent you had for that based purely on the fact you didn't make statistics your life's work.

So pre-internet, we were forced to live in a world where you were limited first by what you could conclude in your own head, next by what was already written down and had to conveniently be around you and thus your resources to know were limited to what was conveniently stockpiled around you (source to bias of the book buyer and creators of said books) and you were like an indigenous island bird being attacked by a foreign feral cat when it came to social or political discourse you were unprepared for.

And some of these people really capitalized on that islandization effect in order to spin yarns of bullshit. Even considering political or social discourse or trying to engage in debate with people that were programmed with conspiracy to "spread awareness" and make assertions that were so hard to determine one way or another from a critique standpoint that they needed refutation by someone in the peer group with the sense or the education, and if you didn't have that guy in your peer group, you might get strongarmed and socially pressured into conformity for this assumed truth.

The internet has changed ALL of that.

I think back to the era when Ninja Turtles and shit were all the rage and everybody was doing wuxi kung fu (tautology lol) nonsense on the playground, and once in a while you'd have a budding feminist get on her soapbox and declare doing that to be orientalist and racist towards Asian people and culture, lettng you know she wasn't going to tolerate even witnessing that without alerting the other girls you were Committing a Racism(tm) and that you were a horrible person for it. And you know what that means; get declared a badthinker, the other girls feel pressured to reject you, or face criticism and rejection themselves from the Girl Squad for enabling you or tolerating your bad behavior.

That was the kind of peer group crybullying/conscientous bullying you could get away with as a white girl among majority white populations, back in the day. What were you going to do? Side with the racists and let her delusions that she lived in a 1940s/1950s white supremacist den go unchallenged, or make an effort to disprove the dour view she had of the world was fake by disproving it?

But in the back of your mind, you knew, "If only some of the neighbor kids we play make believe with were actually Asian; they'd tell this uppity bitch that kids in Asia also do this make believe bullshit and it doesn't make us Orientalist to do this, just because we're white.." But because the populations, at the time, were largely white European, that sort of thing never happened. There was no convenient Asian Friend to pipe up and go, "Chill, it's.. fucking Ninja Turtles, sis. It's stupid kid make believe games. It's cool. It's okay. It's fine. You're not racist for playing a ninja."

Now adays? Some soapbox standing asshole SJW bitch decides to preen and strut about talking about how western society trivializes Asian culture by buying and reading Naruto, some English speaking Japanese superfan will appear out from under a forum ROCK and go, "Shut up. It's okay to enjoy manga and anime and not be Japanese. Don't speak for me. You're ridiculous."

Do you know what we would've given for that kind of backup as kids in those situations?

And this is made more complicated. Some girls that were driven and indoctrinated to behave and act like that did so genuinely because they felt everything that was said was true, with no ulterior motive, looked through rose tinted glasses and wanted to improve society. Because they thought the only reason racism and such existed was because either nobody cared to critically assess their own actions or thoughts, or they were maliciously bigoted. It wasn't a very big brain mentality and largely accepted by either gullible people, or sycophants that will believe anything if it keeps them out of social trouble.

And then there were the girls that would stick to the idea they needed to "improve society(tm)" by "Starting conversations." So they would out and out lie to you about things like that and try to convey that Asians universally despised when non-Asians played around with some things like action figures and wuxi things the way they would western army men and superheroes, and such things were thoughtless exploitation. While knowing such things weren't true, but wanting to get people underexposed to the conversations or reality to accept this false reality was true, and act accordingly.

Some of them were so deliberately disingenuous that they'd feign not understanding what they believed was untrue, even when, for example, an Asian person would swing into the conversation the SJW girl was having with people that didn't know better, and explain, "this thing you're saying is a problematic behavior is not a problem, actually, they're not being bigots. It's fine." The girl may apologize, feign knowing better now and to not make that mistake again, and then go to ANOTHER group of people in the absence of the dissenting Asian person to correct the record, and tell that group that whole spiel over again about how white people playing ninja or whatever is bigotry, to try and make them believe something that wasn't true.

But if you didn't have a Mysteriously Materializing Person to correct the record on any given social or political topic being exploited by these people, then you were a very vulnerable target for misinformation in the name of progress. And there was nothing you could do about it, as a layman, but either go to college for the explicit purpose of disproving a water cooler statement someone made one day at lunch, or just dismiss it and get on with your life. Research meant investment in money and time and dedicating your life to that specific thing, just on the offchance to tell someone that either didn't know better, or did and still lied, they weren't telling the truth to a group of people they were trying to educate.

And that back and forth used to happen over MONTHS to YEARS as sources updated and the grapevine spoke and arguments were had.

Just oh my fucking god. The internet has streamlined that miserable back and forth shit so much. And I thank English Second Language people across the world for voluntarily swinging in like wrecking balls, whatever side you're on, because the language and regional barrier used to give these charlatans license to speak on your behalf.

[figula]

what i think is going on wrt covid (basically a compilation of what people who actually know what they're talking about are saying) bc i think i need to write it all down for my own sanity

where we are generally

current worldwide dominant variant is either already or about to be jn.1 which is very immune-evasive (i.e. why it's suddenly winning)

symptoms can be pretty much anything, from asymptomatic, to something indistinguishable from mild allergies, to something indistinguishable from food poisoning, to (EXTREMELY rarely) death

no evidence that severity of disease is either better or worse than other omicron subtypes

at time of writing the UK is seeing an uptick in hospitalisations, which has generally a ~10 day lag on infection time, so we can surmise that covid is rampant atm

where we are w/ long covid

long covid rate per infection seems to have declined steadily since 2020. i like this piece on why the long covid problem has probably peaked already (well sourced, click around)

frustrating lack of cohesion with definition and diagnosis: the CDC defines it as problems going on for FOUR weeks; the WHO only calls it long covid after TWELVE weeks. (personally i think the CDC one is way too keen - it's really not uncommon to have a cough that lasts for 2-3 weeks post-virus and i dont think it necessarily indicates anything "wrong")

there urgently needs to be more clarity re: long covid subtypes: some people are suffering extremely badly with debilitating pain & fatigue, some people have a lingering cough, some people who were hospitalised have been severely deconditioned from lying in a bed for weeks - etc. all of these are conceivably diagnosable as long covid under the current guidelines, with extremely different needs. "long covid" currently comprises such an enormously broad range of symptomology that it seems almost impossible to tease out an individual risk from oft-yelled alarmist statistics like "1 in 10 infections result in long covid". like - ok - what kind of long covid are we talking? bc if you mean "1 in 10 people are still coughing at 4 weeks" i would believe it, but if you mean "1 in 10 people are severely debilitated for years" i would not.

reinfections probably dont incraese the long covid risk by very much, if at all. if you don't get it the first time you're very unlikely to get it the second time

not many (? i dont even think there are any really) treatments for long covid but the patient community is really really driving the research forward

anyway, the outlook for the UK for the next month i think is probably pretty bad on a population level thanks to the new variant jn.1 gaining global dominance, regular seasonal socialising, colder weather, + i wouldnt be surprised if the NHS cant cope (again). there's obviously only so much you can do but you really dont want to be in need of hospital treatment at the beginning of jan, when i suspect things will be worst, when there are no beds + the staff are all overworked hard to say anything about how bad the wave will be on an individual level bc we dont really know anything about jn.1's relative severity one way or the other but the sheer numbers of infected will presumably make it bad at scale if you're in the UK and have plans for christmas (or sooner) i would try and avoid mixing much until those plans happen to be honest, all the data is a week behind at least + even that data is showing large increases in covid activity so the actual picture will be worse by now

also, people whose analysis i generally trust and find helpful - a mixture of doctors / statisticians / biologists etc: paul mainwood oliver johnson prof. christina pagel eric topol jp weiland omicron data there are also a serious amount of covid alarmists on the internet and i find this frustrating at best + actively triggering at worst lol like just bc you're on "the right side" (i.e. you aren't in favour of mass deaths and/or disabling events) you cant just create misinformation + wilfully misinterpret studies lol. like it sucks still but where we are right now is completely different to 2020. if you see anyone comparing covid to "airborne aids" that is your cue to block

[statistichomeowrkhelperblogs]

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[filmcentury]

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960), Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, and aphorist, in The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

For example, consider weighing the annoyance associated with an opportunity to make money against the bliss of refusing the opportunity and the money. You're wealthy if you can afford to go with the blissful option.

[styck-figure]

What are all their super names for the synthdragon au? How did they get their powers?

Most people are born with their powers--though they'll crop up at different ages, normally when you're a kid, but the hollowheads tend to be exceptions. Purple got theirs through genetic experiments. King realized his when he was an adult because it was so understated.

I am not proud of all of these. If you have better ideas for some of them go ahead. Putting it under read more because it's a lot.

Perpetia - Chosen - Narrative powers. Summons powers based on narrative need or comedic potential.

Lytic - Dark - Weaker form of narrative powers. Hates being a joke, and can't utilize the narrative as well, so she uses tech-support.

Sketchpad - Second - unknown powers. Uses tech-support from Alan that can physically form what they draw. Second can also animate them to life--is that his powers or the tech? Alan's not quite sure, but isn't going to tell Sec that.

Beastkeeper - Red - Usually just goes by "Beast." He can read and understand souls. Animals "Speak with their whole souls" so Red can undertand them. To a lesser extend, he can manipulate them too. This gets harder with more complex souls, so he can't quite manipulate humans. His own soul is also very easy to manipulate, so he can get possessed and mind controlled a lot easier than his peers. Alchemist - Blue - Plant creation. Uses it to make potions and poisons. Knows the human body ridiculously well, and can pretty much talk to plants. Sort of. We ignore the fact that she is addicted to his netherwart (it is the one thing he cannot grow on her own). Synthwave - Green - He can create physical objects/barriers out of rhythms and songs. Rhythms can make stable but simple things, like a staff, but full songs can make complex objects. The more familiar he is with the song, the more complex and stable the object. Which is why they make their own songs

Statistician - Yellow - She's a fun one. Probability manipulation. The more she uses it and the more she tries to change ‘unchangable’ events, the more she just becomes a vessel for it. She has to take a lot of breaks and understand butterfly effect really well. Doesn’t sleep much. I really like the lucky block episode. She can read probabilities without much of a drawback, but she hates looking at it in general, so she prefers tech too.

Dragonfly - Purple - A handful of biological upgrades. The main ones mentioned are dragonfly wings and antennae that can scent the air. Most people think it's tech, like King, and Purple lets them believe that. The first time King saw them in the dark their eyes glowed with bioluminescence and he screamed.

King - MT - Primarily his staff, which is his own technological creation. His actual power is being able to read anything really fast. He trained it up when he was a young adult and only realized then that being able to flip through a book and understand every word was actually not normal.